CPU & RAM in a storage box

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

I happen to have an IBM SAN storage at home, so I am familiar with IBM line
of storage products. The EXP3000 is an expansion to IBM storage, which can
perform for itself (JBoD), however - it contains no CPU, or RAID abilities
internally. You will have to connect it to an additional server (1U, I
assume) which will include the RAID hardware, if you decide to use it, and
OS.

I have not seen any commodity ATOM 1U systems. I know someone in my or IT
Experts forum in Tapuz has asked about such a solution, and it is not simple
to find. ATOMs are limited with the max amount of RAM. Desktop-class CPUs
are also rather rare in the 1-2U markets, and are far from trivial to
obtain, and worse - get service for.

Ez

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 12:27 AM, Hetz Ben Hamo <hetzbh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 2010/9/9 Etzion Bar-Noy <ezaton at tournament.org.il>
>
> This is a joke, right? You want someone to host your system, which, by
>> design, will not be rack-mountable, and would be large, due to the amount of
>> disks you are to place there. It is possible, but extremely expensive to
>> host a non-1-U server nowadays. Who would "give" it to you?
>
>
> Huh? Of course it will be rack-mountable. I'm planning to put it on a 2U or
> 3U chassis.  I'm also not looking for someone to host my hardware, I already
> got a rack in Netvision today.
>
>
>> An industrial-grade, 2U system could host, today, about 6 3.5" SATA disks.
>> A 3 U can do much more, with up to 12-14 disks, depending on the system.
>>
>
> IBM EXP 3000 can host 12 3.5" hard drives on a 2U chassis. See this<ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/tsd03025usen/TSD03025USEN.PDF>PDF file. There are other 2U cases which can  host 12 3.5" disks.
>
> And RAM is extremely important. Since you will not invest in an
>> industial-class RAID controller (3ware, LSI-Logic, Adaptec, Intel, etc)
>> which will cost several hundreds of dollars, as I see it, you would want to
>> compensate for the high write latency with a large amount of RAM and fully
>> buffered writes (not secure, but good enough). Especially with 7200RPM SATA
>> drives with low seek speed.
>> NFS shares, in "async" mode would give great performance, provided you
>> give the system enough RAM. Then your RAM will actually become the disk
>> write cache.
>>
>
> Since this machine will not be using any Xeon with it's expensive RAM, I
> could put some gigs of RAM quite easily.
>
> Thanks for your points.
> Hetz
>
>>
>>
> Ez
>>
>> 2010/9/9 Hetz Ben Hamo <hetzbh at gmail.com>
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>
>>> 2010/9/9 geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendelson at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Sep 9, 2010, at 6:35 PM, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I'm planning to add some big storage solution to my VPS business. I did
>>>>> some checking and calculated the costs, and figured out that if I want to
>>>>> have a decent 12TB solution NAS box, it would be best if I would roll my
>>>>> own. (12 TB before all the RAID stuff, after that it would lot less). All
>>>>> other solutions are very expensive (example: IBM EXP 3000 costs here 6K nis
>>>>> without a single hard disk).
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> The question you should be asking yourself, IMHO, is what can I buy that
>>>> will be as reliable as a commerical, "industrial grade" server?
>>>
>>>
>>> Not looking for industrial grade one.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>  I'm planning to use hardware based RAID card, minimal Linux
>>>>> distribution and have some offers like iSCSI, NFS, CIFS - the usual
>>>>> suspects.
>>>>>
>>>>> My question is: since I'll use hardware RAID card, which processor and
>>>>> how much RAM should I put in such a machine? Xeon is overkill IIRC.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For example, a system which costs under 900 NIS would do the job. You
>>>> can get them from Ivory or KSP. They have a dual core ATOM processor,
>>>> one PCI slot and one DDR2 memory slot. The power supply is not very big,
>>>> but it will power a bunch of 5400 rpm "green" disks.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This storage will be mainly used for backups. If someone wants to do a
>>> colocation to my rack, I want to give him a bonus, something that you can't
>>> find today with my competitors: I want to give him 50-100GB for storage.
>>> You'll get an NFS/CIFS/iSCSI and you mount it to your machine and use it for
>>> your backup/rsync/whatever. By comparison, when you colocate a server to
>>> Netvision's farm, you get ... 5GB backup space.. yippee..
>>>
>>>
>>>> How well will it work? How long will it last? Will it be fast enough?
>>>>
>>>
>>>  "Fast" doesn't matter much when you're doing backups or storing some
>>> temporary stuff, does it really matter when it take 20 seconds instead of 10
>>> when you're doing rsync? I don't think so..
>>>
>>>
>>>> And the "killer" question, how much will it cost to replace, in the
>>>> value of downtime, your time to replace it, bad will among your customers,
>>>> etc?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Really depends. I'm not planning to fully use all the disks, some will be
>>> disconnected or out of the RAID, perhaps I'll put a redundant PSU.
>>>
>>> Hetz
>>>
>>>
>>>> Geoff.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
>>>> To help restaurants, as part of the "stimulus package", everyone must
>>>> order dessert. As part of the socialized health plan, you are forbidden to
>>>> eat it. :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org
>>> Skype: heunique
>>> MSN: hetz-blog at benhamo.org
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>
>
> --
> my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org
> Skype: heunique
> MSN: hetz-blog at benhamo.org
>
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